REVIEW

Guild of Dungeoneering Review

by Sam Foxall, July 14th, 2015

Guild of Dungeoneering attempts to fuse aspects of roguelikes, dungeon crawlers, CCGs and base building games to create one grand package, filled with monsters and loot. Does this fusion of genres create a game greater than the sum of its parts, or is it a Frankengame which excels at nothing in particular?

To start, there is very little set up to the Guild of Dungeoneering when it comes to plot and narrative. You control a guild for wannabe dungeon crawlers, set up after you were spurned by the prestigious Ivory League and in order to prove you are better at dungeoneering and guild management than them, you send poor adventurers off to various dark caves and ruins in order to gain gold and glory. That’s it. There’s no grander story about the land you live in, no exploration in the effects of dungeoneering, it is just you and a constant revolving door of warriors that you can fling into a skeleton infested tomb. The only bit of extra story is an ever-present bard who sings a short ditty every time you return from a dungeon run or build a new section of your guild hall. While his songs act as a source of mild amusement to start, they soon grate as you hear the one about the cat burglar for the 4th time and the bloody thing doesn’t even rhyme. In the pre-release version of the game which I reviewed, you could not turn the bugger off as the options menu had yet to be implemented but in the retail version, you can actually edit the volume options and silence his crooning.

This underpins my whole experience with the Guild of Dungeoneering, with most aspects starting off interesting before becoming irritating incredibly quickly, as opportunities are missed and you realise just how basic the game is. Let’s talk about the actual experience of dungeoneering then. When you start your career, you begin with one character class and a single room in your guild hall which you must gradually build up by conquering various dungeons. Each dungeon is split up into usually 2 or 3 quests which you must complete in order to clear the area. These range from kill 3 enemies, get to a set location within the turn count, defeat the boss, open 3 treasure chests and so on. This is where the first major problem with the Guild of Dungeoneering presents itself, as every quest has a set layout and the only thing that changes is the way you fill in the gaps. You see, the Guild of Dungeoneering doesn’t work like your typical dungeon crawler. Instead of the player controlling their character through a pre-generated dungeon, you construct the dungeon around your player character and they explore through it themselves. You place down tiles which connect rooms together and you can also place loot and monsters at your own discretion, making each run as difficult as you want it to be.

Unfortunately, while the tiles you gain may be randomly generated, each quest has the same template which ultimately cuts out the real random element of dungeon crawling. You know exactly where the chest is going to be or where the boss spawns, your job is just to make the optimal route there. The game then functions like a traditional pen and paper RPG, where the player gets a set number of moves to place down monster, loot and room tiles before the enemy gets their turn to move certain pieces around. The problem is that once monsters are placed down, they do not have a mind of their own. Besides set boss monsters, enemies will stay in exactly the same position and will not move round to make the dungeon experience any more challenging. Furthermore, the fact that you can pretty much always see where the monsters are, makes it no surprise when a Gnoll jumps out of nowhere to bite your face off. Being both the dungeon master and player at the same time dilutes the fun of both experiences, making the process of crafting and exploring a dungeon lack any surprise moments which makes playing a dungeon crawler so much fun.

You may build a clear path to the objective, but your adventurer will probably walk off in the other direction.

What’s more is the fact that you can’t even effectively plan out your next move whilst travelling through each dungeon. After each turn, your tiles reset meaning that perfect crossroad tile that could connect those corridors together may disappear which could make a turn completely useless. If there was some way to reserve certain tiles for the next turn, that would be perfect but seeing as you can’t do that, some turns can be rendered obsolete by bad card draws. This is made more infuriating by the fact that you don’t have direct control over your player character, meaning that they may start walking the other way or bump straight into a monster you were trying to navigate away from because you couldn’t do anything to keep them where they were. You can be at the complete mercy of the computer, especially when you are looking right at the goal tile but your player character blunders straight past it and causes you to fail the mission because you didn’t get there in time.

When you do get into a fight, it transitions to a very basic card battler where you and your enemy takes turns in playing cards to slowly reduce each other’s health. While your class determines what base deck you get, the rest of your cards are determined by the loot which you find in the dungeon. Loot cards are broken down into cards for your off-hand and main weapons, as well as ones for your headgear and body armour, which each one bestowing specific card sets when you equip them. A troll femur might give you an unblockable slam move while also giving you a card that forces you to do nothing. A sparkly headband may give you a card which gives you a bonus to your magic attack or allows you to block some magic damage. Each loot piece bestows the same cards and it just becomes a matter of either equipping loot to amplify the current set of cards in your class deck or getting loot to cover the weaknesses which your class has.

Most cards can be split into attack or defence cards, with them either dealing or negating magic/physical damage. Some cards may buff your physical damage for the next turn or make do extra damage if the enemy plays an unblockable attack card at the same time as you. There is some complexity to the battling system once you unlock the classes back at the guildhall and you have to deal with enemy-specific buffs and debuffs but it is still luck of the draw as to which loot cards you get. Classes range from typical RPG archetypes like the bruiser and the apprentice, who focus on physical and magic damage respectively but you also get some unique classes like the mime and cat burglar The mime acts as the equivalent of a red mage in other RPGs, having usage of both magic and physical attacks in their basic decks but excelling in neither type. The cat burglar is a sort of like a hybrid thief and rogue class, gaining an extra loot card choice when you beat an enemy or open a chest, as well as doing tons of physical damage at the cost of low health. There are many more and it is welcoming to see that the Guild of Dungeoneering has tried to inject some humour into the traditional classes you find in dungeon crawlers.

Each class has its own appearance and its own set of little text reactions when encountering an enemy or a piece of loot. Some are funny but most are cringe worthy and could do with a once over for unintentional spelling and grammar mistakes. There is no real sense that your dungeoneers grow as you continue to quest. The only pre-planning you get before a quest is choosing the trinket which will bestow you with minor stat boosts and you can’t customise your character’s basic decks or add any extra cards to them. Like the dungeoneering itself, the battling lacks anything to make it feel unique and does not have the polish of many other card battlers out there.

Once you place down your guildhall pieces, you hardly interact with your home base at all.

The problems could be easily fixed if the ways dungeons were designed were just tweaked slightly. Make what would be the quests simple dungeon floors, with it being your job to navigate from a starting piece to a set piece at the end where you would descend further. While also making what were the quests, optional objectives which give you extra loot or bonus gold for completing them. Each dungeon then feels more like a grand adventure, rather than you just dipping in and out to complete random chores. This also goes for the combat in the Guild of Dungeoneering, which feels very ephemeral and does not reward you keeping your people alive. Rather than characters gaining global XP and keeping the loot they acquire in dungeons, they lose everything as soon as you complete the quest. This would be fine if the game was set up like the Binding of Isaac, where each run was set as its own unique run and every dungeon was completely different due to the procedural generation of the game. However, due to the fact that you gradually unlock later stages of a dungeon and there is an emphasis on slowly building your guildhall up with more rooms and more loot cards, it stands to reason that each character would slowly gain power based on the number of completed runs they do. This is not the case, making your experience feel very disempowering when you basically come back to the guild empty handed, besides a bit more gold which goes on unlocking more loot cards which you will then proceed to forget in the dungeon if you succeed. When you realise that you are basically dungeon crawling for loot that you don’t get to keep, it makes the whole endeavour pointless when the process of gradually gaining better weapons or armour is the main reason people play dungeon crawlers in the first place.

It then makes failing a run feel like not a big deal. While you may have lost the mission, another adventurer of the same class will instantly pop up and you can simply fling another body at the wall and hope it cracks. By the same note, there is no satisfaction to succeeding as you get no tangible bonus to the character that lived through the experience. They don’t get any small bonuses to stats, they don’t gain any visual differences, they simply revert to the state in which they arrived. While you may eventually gain access to a new class or build a new room for your guild hall, you don’t actually feel like you’ve made any improvements as a player.

This overall sense of lack stretches to the game’s presentation as well. While it does nail the aesthetic of an old school pen and paper RPG, which the dungeons being mapped on graph paper and each character being a small pencil drawing, the overall art style is incredibly flat. All the classes have the exact same face, with the only thing that changes is the torso they have. You cannot customise their hair, eyes, height or any other factor of them, they are simply another clone to toss into a dungeon and hope they come back alive. The game just comes off as incredibly twee, with its story time bard singing the same old song and every character having the same cutesy eyes, no matter if they are a minotaur, a mime or a scorpion. The Guild of Dungeoneering soundtrack feels like it is made up from a series of royalty-free music tracks, while battles lack real sound effects or attack animations, making fights feel very dull. It has no real flair to it and has nothing which makes the experience feel at all memorable.

Ultimately, I don’t know who the Guild of Dungeoneering is for. While its twee artstyle, kiddy humour and simplistic systems make it seem great for the young ones, its lack of colour and engaging gameplay will not hook them for long. It will not be one for veteran dungeon crawler or roguelike fans, as its myriad of poor design decisions and relative lack of content compared to games like Darkest Dungeon or The Binding of Isaac make it simply not worth buying for the asking price. If it was for iPads and tablets (due to the drag and drop interface it uses for everything) and £5 cheaper, I may recommend Guild of Dungeoneering as a good way to pacify game loving children or introduce them to this burgeoning genre but as it stands, it is a game which does not satisfy anyone and will probably be forgotten under the pile of better dungeon crawlers out there.